The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

The largest US state is 66 times as populous as the smallest but it has only 18 times as many electoral votes. Wah! Boo hoo! It isn’t fair!

Some people think we ought to change everything so that votes in the electoral college come out the sane as the results of the popular vote. One way to do that would be simply to abolish history and redraw the map of the states, so that every state had approximately the same population.

It’s a spectacularly stupid idea, but it does produce an interesting new map and some very cool new states’ names.

“In an election in which Obama won the popular vote 51%-47%, a politically neutral division of the nation into 50 equal-population states would have given Romney 58% of the electoral votes and Obama 42%. Equal-population districts work against the Obama Democratic coalition.”

OK, I’m willing to live in Shenandoah and give up plenty of history to avoid another Obama.